Word grouping game

Each time you submit a guess, the game looks up the group of every chosen word. When all four belong together, the group leaves the board and comes back as a coloured row with its link. When three of them do, a one away message appears. Any wrong guess costs one mistake, but the same four words tried again cost nothing and only bring an "already tried" note.

The board opens in an order fixed for each puzzle, the same for everyone playing this page. An order that would put a whole group in one row is drawn again, so the first row never gives a group away. There is no timer.

Below the words sit the controls that shape each guess, and none of them costs a mistake.

• Shuffle deals the words still on the board into a new random order, which can bring out a link the first order hid.
• Deselect all clears every tile chosen so far.
• Hint shows the link of one group not yet found, as described with the levels below.
• Submit plays the four tiles chosen, and only works when exactly four are picked.

Once three groups are found, the last four words can only be the last group, so it is placed at once. The four mistakes allowed are shown as dots, and the fourth ends the board as not solved with every group shown. Show the answers gives up at any point: it asks for a second tap before it will reveal the answers in the same way. Print this board prints the board in its opening order, with the answers on a second page.

The example board is a board of its own, never served as a daily or practice puzzle, so working through it spoils nothing. It opens with these sixteen words: plum, cherry, level, civic, joke, lemon, safe, apple, egg, code, needle, grape, kayak, marten, radar and cone.

Five of them seem to answer "Fruits": plum, cherry, lemon, apple and grape. A group takes only four, so one of them is a red herring, a decoy that looks as if it fits a link it does not belong to. On this board the decoy is apple.

1. Apple belongs to "Pine___", where every word follows "pine": cone, needle, marten and apple. Without apple, that group would be a word short, which is how the decoy gives itself away.
2. That leaves cherry, plum, lemon and grape as the level 1 group, "Fruits".
3. "Things you can crack" takes code, joke, safe and egg. None of them fits another link on this board.
4. The level 4 group, "Read the same backwards", is kayak, radar, level and civic: each is spelt the same from either end, a palindrome.

Every built-in board is checked the same way before it goes live. With apple allowed in its own group or the one it seems to fit, the example's words still sort in exactly one way.

They mark how hard a group is: the difficulty colours run green, blue, orange and purple, from the most direct link at level 1 to the trickiest at level 4. A level 1 group is usually a plain category nearly everyone sees, while level 4 usually rests on wordplay.

The order of the colours is this site's own choice, and other versions of the game order theirs differently. A found group shows in its level's colour, and the share squares after a board use the same four colours: one line per guess, one square per word.

Hints follow the levels. Each one names the link of the most direct group neither found nor already hinted, up to three per board, and none is given once only one group is left. A hint costs no mistake, but the result and the shared text say how many were used.

A link can be a shared meaning, a word the four combine with, a phrase they complete, or something about their sound or spelling. The same handful of kinds turns up on most boards.

• Members of a category. The Oxford Learner's Dictionaries define a hypernym as a word with a general meaning that takes in more particular ones, the way fruit covers apple and orange.
• Compounds. Oxford Learner's Dictionaries count travel agent, dark-haired and bathroom as compounds. A board turns this into a fill in the blank, such as "Pine___", where the shared word comes before or after each tile.
• Words that follow or precede a word in a fixed phrase, such as things you can break: a record, a habit, the ice.
• Phrasal verbs. Cambridge Dictionary describes a phrasal verb as a verb with a preposition or adverb whose meaning differs from its parts. Give up, give in and give out can share a group.
• Homophones. In Cambridge Dictionary's sense these are words that sound like another word but differ in meaning or spelling, such as pair and pear.
• Hidden words. Each tile holds a smaller word, as scatter hides cat and bowling hides owl.
• Wordplay on the letters themselves: palindromes, anagrams, or words that turn into another word when one letter changes.

Words are written in British spelling, so colour, travelling and grey appear as a UK player writes them. Anagram groups reward a feel for letters, and the word unscrambler lists every word a set of letters can make.

A new daily puzzle starts at midnight on the clock of the device you play on, so a phone or computer set to UK time changes board at UK midnight. Everyone on this page gets the same board in the same opening order.

The first daily puzzle is the board of 13 October 2026, and each day after it plays the next board in order. The 76 daily boards written so far cover the days up to 27 December 2026. Unless more are added by then, the series starts again from the first board on 28 December 2026.

The archive lists the days of the current round up to today, newest first, each with its date and its state: solved, not solved, in progress or not played. Any of them can be opened and played, free, with no subscription and no account. An archive day counts as played, but only a puzzle solved on its own day extends the streak.

Practice puzzles are a separate set of 39 boards that never appear as daily ones, so practising spoils no future day. Play a practice board picks one not played yet at random, and once every one has been played, any of them can come round again. With the archive, that makes for unlimited play.

Statistics cover the daily puzzles only: puzzles played, the share solved, and the current and best streak. They also count the boards solved with no mistakes, one, two or three, and those not solved. Results and boards in progress, from which the statistics are counted, stay in this browser's local storage under the name word-groups-game-results. They are never sent anywhere, tied to no name, and deleted when the site data is cleared.

Once the page and its boards have loaded, play needs no connection, though a reload does. For a second daily puzzle of another kind, the daily anagram game sets a new round of jumbled words each day.

Create opens a board maker with four links and four words for each, from the most direct group at level 1 to the trickiest at level 4. A word can have up to 24 characters and a link up to 60. A word typed twice is refused, even with different capitals or accents, since the game would read both as one word.

Play it opens the finished board at once, and Copy link gives a shareable link that holds the whole board after the # sign. The IETF's URI standard, RFC 3986, section 3.5, has that fragment handled by the browser alone, so the board never reaches a server and is not stored on this site. Whoever opens the link plays it.

Fill in the example loads the example board from this page as a starting point. A home-made board suits a quiz night, a lesson or a family group chat, and a board opened from someone's link is kept in progress like any other. This site has not checked boards made by visitors, and the page that opens one says so.

For a game played out loud in one room, the forehead guessing game runs on a single phone held up by the guesser while the others give clues.

The shape of the board is older than most web versions. The BBC's programme page for the first episode of Only Connect shows it going out on BBC Four on 15 September 2008, presented by Victoria Coren, now Victoria Coren Mitchell. The quiz's Connecting Wall hides four groups among sixteen clues, and on television it is played against the clock. The programme has since moved to BBC Two.

The New York Times Company's announcement says the beta of its Connections opened on 12 June 2023. Connections is that company's trade mark, and this page is affiliated neither with it nor with the BBC.

Naming what words share is far older as a test task. Lewis Terman's The Measurement of Intelligence (1916) sets out a Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon scale. It asks eight-year-olds how wood and coal are alike, and twelve-year-olds to compare three things.

Every board on this page is written in British English rather than translated: UK spelling, places, food, sayings and the general knowledge of a UK player. The pages in the other languages have boards of their own, written in each language from scratch.

Finding the word that ties others together has been studied at least since Mednick's Remote Associates Test of 1962, which Bowden and Jung-Beeman's 2003 paper builds on. Their norms cover 144 compound remote associate problems. Each gives words such as age, mile and sand and asks for the one word that forms a compound or phrase with all of them: stone.

In those norms about 50% of the problems were solved within 30 seconds, and a solution often arrived with a sudden "Aha!" feeling of insight. A fill in the blank group such as "Pine___" asks for the same leap.

Banks and Connell's 2023 category production norms, collected in the UK, record which members people name for 117 concrete and abstract categories. Members that come to mind first for most people are the stuff of a direct level 1 group.

Whole boards were put to people and machines by Samadarshi and colleagues at EMNLP 2024, using 438 boards from the New York Times' version of the game. A small group of expert players fully solved 32 of 50 boards and novices 18 of 100, while the best language model fully solved 18% of all boards.

Brooker and colleagues' 2019 online study of 19,078 cognitively healthy adults aged 50 to 93 found that people who did word puzzles more often scored better on tests of thinking. That is an association, not proof that puzzles improve or protect thinking, and the authors call for it to be tested.

A word grouping game board falls one group at a time, and each group found leaves fewer words to sort. Reading the whole board before choosing any tile shows where a fifth candidate for an obvious link waits as a red herring. The group with no rival words is the safest first guess, even when another looks easier. Being told one away means three of the four are right and only one word needs swapping. Wordplay groups tend to fall last: spellings read backwards, hidden words and sounds. Shuffle breaks up an order that has stopped giving ideas, and a hint costs no mistake. With only four mistakes allowed, a guess checked against the other groups first is rarely wasted.

The counting shows why the first group is the hard part. There are 1,820 ways to pick a first guess of four from sixteen words, and 2,627,625 ways to split the board into four groups. Once one group is found, the twelve words left split only 5,775 ways, and with two found the last eight split just 35 ways.